Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

“You want to know what the real story is?”

“Well, duh.”

That tone—for a moment, he reminded me of Stella.

“Good.” I smiled. “This means I might be able to get my producer interested in it, too.”

He laughed again. “So you’re not going to tell me?”

“I don’t have any answers yet. But I’ll try.”

“Your job sounds fun,” he said.

“It is. Mostly,” I said. “Some days more than others.”

“Do you want to switch? Write this brief for me and I’ll take a turn as Murphy Brown?”

“The first and only time in my life I’ll be compared to Candice Bergen.”

“Well, you’re just as pretty as her.”

Both of us were quiet for a moment. I was relieved Oliver couldn’t see me blushing—but then again, if we’d been face-to-face, there was no way he would have said that. The phone, the office, the topic of conversation, it had neutralized the terrain. He wasn’t Stella’s big brother. I wasn’t her best friend. We were just two people, talking.

From his end of the phone, there was the distant whoop of an ambulance from outside his office. In a minute or two, that ambulance would probably pass the KCN building. In those days between Christmas and New Year’s, the city was quiet. Sirens echoed louder through the streets. Some people chose to take vacation, or to be with their families. Other people chose work. Oliver, I decided as I hung up the phone, really wasn’t so bad.

A friend from college threw a party on New Year’s Eve. Her parents were in Sun Valley, and she was alone in their Central Park West penthouse.

The hostess’s smile deflated when she saw me arrive alone. “Where’s your other half?” she said, air-kissing my cheek.

“Stella?” I said.

“She still traveling the world? Lucky bitch. My parents won’t give me a dime.”

She put her hands on her hips and laughed harshly. We were in the marble-floored foyer of the apartment. The ceilings were double height and chandeliered, and there was a round table that held several dramatic orchids and what looked like a small Degas. This girl was skinny like Stella, but I could read the starvation on her body. The bony chest, the bobble-head effect. She had always sucked up to Stella in college. Stella, with her effortless beauty and natural measurements, made look easy what the hostess killed herself to achieve.

I’d arrived too early. There were a few docile boyfriends at the perimeter, but most of the group was girls. The party was still more of a pregame, clustered around the island in the kitchen, which was sticky with spilled tequila and lime husks. It was the moment in the night when the hostess was entirely pleased with herself, with the assembled group of women who reflected back her aesthetic ideals. The best pictures of the night would be taken now, when the apartment was still empty, the fridge brimming with liquor.

The girls kept asking me where Stella was. We’d been invited as a package deal, but they really wanted her. I was a little too plain, too serious, too sober. Everyone liked to say that after high school, popularity contests ended. That was true in most cases. But, like high school, the world of Manhattan trust-fund babies was an artificial construct. Nothing really mattered; everything was signaling; it was as insular and petty as a high school cafeteria. These girls were hungry and anxious, but they had perfect blowouts and designer clothing, and they took comfort in telling one another how hot they looked. Which was true—they did look hot. It was possible to envy them, and hate oneself for envying them, all at once.

Around 11 p.m., as the party started to fill up, I slipped out unnoticed. The subway was nearly empty. Most people would stay put, wherever they were, as the clock approached midnight. But being underground at midnight didn’t seem like the worst possibility. I’d never liked New Year’s Eve. So one year was ending and another beginning—did no one notice that life itself proceeded without interruption, indifferent to your resolutions and reflections?

If Stella were there, I would have leaned over and said this to her. She would have laughed and called me a cynical bitch, but she also would have agreed. Our friendship was built on those moments, when our perspectives overlapped like binoculars twisting into focus. We said to each other what we wouldn’t say to other people.

But for Stella, observation wasn’t the same as belief. She spent her opinions like she spent her family’s money: easily, constantly, but never as an investment in something permanent. She’d say something provocative, and often true, but then she’d abandon it. When pushed on a comment she’d made, she’d shrug and say that she wasn’t really serious; she didn’t really care. For a long time, Stella’s indifference had impressed me. Other people would feel bad about running away from home on Christmas Eve. Stella? She was probably drinking a mai tai on a beach somewhere.

And that was fine. Having Stella back in New York had been exciting, but it was also exhausting. At some point in the last several months, our lives had diverged. She wanted spontaneity and freedom. I wanted routine and discipline. I wanted to care about my work. If this was the new pattern, Stella coming and going as she pleased—maybe that was okay. Maybe we needed some breathing room. To occupy our own separate lives.

Pete, the doorman, was on duty that night. “Just a few minutes to midnight,” he said. “Did you race home to catch it?”

“Nah,” I said. “It’ll be a quiet night for me.”

“That’s good,” he said. “That reminds me, actually. Miss Stella asked me to tell you that she was very tired, and she was going to sleep. She was driving for hours.”

“Stella?” I said. “She’s back?”

Pete nodded, smiling brightly. “Happy New Year!” he said, as the elevator door closed.

I’D REACHED THE one-year mark at KCN in August. A year was a solid, respectable thing. Now when I heard the new assistants and interns bragging about the number of months they had under their belts, I thought, months! Who were they kidding? Of the six other interns who had started with me, five had already washed out. The last remaining girl was always crying when the senior producers yelled at her. I gave her until October, tops.

At this point, I’d learned the ropes, and figured out how to navigate the personalities within the newsroom. I knew how Rebecca liked her coffee (extra hot, skim milk), and I knew what to talk about with a nervous guest in the green room (pets, children). But when I was at my desk, hours sucked into technical scut work, I enviously watched Jamie coming and going from meetings with senior staff. That world was so much bigger than mine: sources and scoops, competitive bookings and big gets. I didn’t want to be an assistant anymore. I wanted to be a producer, helping to make the news.

“Let me give you some advice,” Jamie said, one afternoon in September. He’d emerged from yet another meeting, looking dismayed. “You know how you should pick a lane and stick to it?”

“You’ve said that a hundred times,” I said. Jamie was always harping on developing a beat, finding an angle that others weren’t covering. “I’m trying, okay? I really am.”

He plopped down in his chair and shook his head. “No. What I was going to say is, when you pick a lane, make sure you don’t pick a lane that’s about to be blocked off for the foreseeable future. Because then you don’t have a lane. You’re just stuck in traffic, like a chump. And then—I don’t know. I give up on this metaphor.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve spent five years covering the DoD, and now this administration is going to choke the life out of it. Did you see the latest budget cuts?”